One of the principles from agile and lean software development is transparency. Making things visible helps teams to decide what to do and to collaborate effectively with their stakeholders. It can also help to increase the quality of software. This post provides ideas how you can do that.
On October 22 I will do a full day workshop Valuable Agile Retrospectives at Agile Tour London. For registration please see the Agile Tour London training page.
More and more organizations are implementing agile with Scrum. They define teams and assign Scrum masters to the teams to start working agile and become self-organized. Although agile looks easy, to implement the Scrum master role often turns out to be problematic. Let's discuss what makes it so difficult to work with full-time Scrum masters and explore the alternative of having technical people taking the Scrum master role.
In this guest blog post on BenLinders.com David Horowitz, CEO and Co-Founder of Retrium, explores why you should do continuous agile retrospectives and how you can do them to establish continuous improvement.
People are often afraid to make mistakes. They do things to prevent that something might go wrong and avoid doing things that might fail. And if it does go wrong then they don't talk about it. Is it really bad if once in a while something goes wrong? If something can go wrong, let arrange for it to happen as soon as possible, because then you can quickly learn from it. Create a culture where failure is allowed so that we can all learn from it and find ways to make fewer mistakes!
Retrospective Doughnuts can be used to make the adoption rate of retrospectives and the value that they deliver visible. This support organizations in using retrospectives to establish a routine feedback loop leading to continuous improvement. A guest blog post from Mukyul Vyas.
Here's a story of a team that had a serious problem which it didn't recognize at first. The story shows that sometimes doing nothing can be the best thing that you can do to implement lasting change in organizations.
Retrospective is a special time dedicated to analyse the strength and weakness of the teamwork process. There is already some well known tools used to animate this meeting and we tend to use often the same kind of exercise, which can lead to demotivation among the team members and to the feeling of not being able to improve anything anymore. We need to go back to the initial goal of the retrospective : getting better together, by using the collective intelligence and by ensuring the involvement of every team member as much in the creative process as in its application.
In the mini-workshop Experience new exercises to spice up your agile retrospective #RetroValue that I gave at Lean Kanban France teams experienced three different retrospectives exercises. They learned how retrospectives can help them to gain deeper insight in their situation and came up with actions to deal with problems and improve their performance.
The book Management 3.0 workout by Jurgen Appelo provides many practices, games and tools that enable organizations to improve the way they manage themselves and how they treat and support their employees. Where Management 3.0 already provides the backgrounds and insights on better management, this new book gives concrete examples on how to implement it.
I'm proud to annouce that the second edition of our successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives has been released. This edition is available in print via Amazon and Lulu and can be downloaded as eBook from InfoQ and Leanpub. It has also been translated into Dutch and published as Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives.
Binnen Agile en Lean software ontwikkeling speelt dienend leiderschap een belangrijke rol. Zelf-organiserende teams kennen een scrum master die als een dienend leider het team begeleidt en ondersteund. Vanuit deze achtergrond heb ik het boek Dienend Leiderschap van Henk Jan Kamsteeg gelezen. Het heeft mij enkele nieuwe inzichten gegeven en gestimuleerd om mij verder te verdiepen in het onderwerp.